1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a paper sheet sorting apparatus such as a letter sorter for sorting letters or the like mails in accordance with addresses thereof, or more in particular to a paper sheet sorting apparatus for controlling the interval of supplied letters in accordance with the information amount of the letters to be processed.
2. Description of the Related Art
A letter sorter will be explained as an example of the paper sheet sorting apparatus. In the letter sorter, letters supplied one by one from a supply means are transported to a deposit means by a transport means. In the process, the information on the hardness and shape of the letters and the sorting information such as the address are fetched, and the letters are introduced to a predetermined deposit means accordance with the result of processing the information.
The information processing speed is one of stumbling blocks to increasing the number of letters capable of being processed in a unit time by the letter sorter (hereinafter referred to as xe2x80x9cthe processing speedxe2x80x9d). Especially, the character recognition for reading an address is a time-consuming process. Letters have addresses, some printed in characters and others handwritten. Since different users have different characteristics, characters of handwritten addresses are more difficult and require longer time to recognize than those of printed addresses.
As disclosed in JP-A-63-143132, for example, some conventional letter sorters can change the interval of letters supplied according to the size of the letters involved. According to the prior art, the interval of letters supplied can be changed according to the size of the letters, but cannot be changed according to the load of information to be processed. In the case where an address is printed in characters, the recognition is accomplished with a margin. In other words, the performance of the character recognition means is not fully utilized. In the case where an address of a letter is handwritten, on the other hand, the performance of the character recognition means may be exceeded since the address may not be recognized. As described above, with the conventional letter sorters, the interval at which letters are supplied cannot be changed according to the information load to be processed. The problem is posed that the performance of the character recognition means cannot be effectively utilized or the address cannot be read and sorted successfully.
Accordingly, the object of the present invention is to improve the processing speed of a paper sheet sorting apparatus by making the most of the information processing means such as a character recognition means.
According to the present invention, in order to solve the above-mentioned problems, there is provided a paper sheet sorting apparatus comprising at least a supply means for supplying paper sheets one by one, a supply control means for controlling the supply means, an information acquisition means for acquiring information on the paper sheets, an information processing means for processing the information acquired by the information acquisition means, a deposit means for depositing the paper sheets processed by the information processing means, a distribution means for distributing the paper sheets processed by the information processing means among predetermined ones of the deposit means, a transport means for transporting the paper sheets from the supply means to the deposit means, a load measuring means for measuring the amount of the load to be processed by the information processing means and a transfer means for transferring the load measured by the load measuring means to the supply control means.